Field of the Invention
The invention relates to management technologies, and more particularly, to an innovated smart parking assistance system for use in parking lots and to an information system for bi-directional communication therewith.
Descriptions of the Related Art
As there are getting more and more vehicles in the city, it becomes harder for people when driving out to find parking spaces. In order to solve the problems of traffic jam and difficulty in parking, more and more large parking lots are built in the city. How to manage the parking lots for efficient parking guidance is thus a big challenge.
Most of current parking assistance systems used in the parking lots can merely prompt drivers about if there is a parking space available or how many parking spaces are available. They however cannot guide the drivers to the available parking spaces quickly in the parking lots, and the information prompted by the systems is not updated real time.
Moreover, even if a current parking guiding system of a parking lot may allow a driver when arriving in the parking lot to know locations of the available parking spaces, this service is not applicable to getting precise locations of available parking spaces in a remote parking lot or on different parking lot levels, nor applicable to reserving the parking spaces. The parking guiding system cannot provide dynamic information of vehicles running in the parking lot either. A proper prompt of the vehicle movement dynamic information should compensate the lack of the current parking guiding system. Particularly, if the guiding system informs the driver of having two available parking spaces in area A of the parking lot but is not able to show him/her there are two vehicles being moving towards area A in the meantime (this means area A is going to be full and not having free parking spaces), and then if the driver stills goes to area A, he/she would only waste time and fuel instead of getting a parking space. Thus, the current guiding system of the parking lot may easily cause guiding mistakes and cannot effectively help the driver find an available parking space, and even undesirably leads to increase in parking time for the driver and air pollution in the parking lot.
Therefore, how to provide an innovated smart parking guiding system for parking lots in the city in order to improve parking efficiency for vehicles and reduce social costs is an important topic in the art.